Part II – Santa

“I told you to turn left, but no, do you listen? Satan forbid you ask someone for directions!” Pam shrieked with exasperation when they and their minivan finally arrived an hour later in which time Sookie and Eric had managed to successfully tuck in the children they had in their care and snuggle up by the fire.

“Did we interrupt something?” Niall asked, not so innocently of the couple in mid make-out before the four remaining kids bound and attacked Sookie and Eric with the pent up energy of being stuck in the car with two bickering parents.

“Where’s Eva?” Pinnie demanded while trying to suppress a yawn and simultaneously trying to climb Mount Eric who was sprawled on the floor with Sookie. Her three, equally tired but petulantly denying of that fact, brothers followed in quick pursuit as her Sherpas to climb Eric’s tall frame while he tried to stand up.

“In bed, fast asleep!” Eric grinned while holding the clambering little girl up high to the pine ceiling. “Where you all belong too!”

“Noooo!” they all screamed from their latched position to one part or another of Eric’s body, two were currently wrapped around a leg each while the third boy hung onto his waist. With wide and uncharacteristically clumsy steps he hurried his way to the staircase before they dared let go, flying up to the children’s bedrooms.

“Not nice,” Pinnie pouted after he had wrestled her and the boys into their respective bunk beds.

“Night, night,” he grinned before kissing away the set frown on her face.

“Night, Uncle Ewic,” she yawned before falling to a deep sleep seconds later.

“Honestly Pamela, it’s like I’m telling you to behave more than Viggo and Eva,” Eric admonished as he swatted her hands away from the berries she was messing with on the plate, arranging them into the shape of a rather large phallus.

“Whatever, Mr. Mom,” she said with a roll of her eyes from her perched seat at the kitchen island. “Sorry, I’m not perfect like your other children.”

Eric ignored the snide comment as his eyes fell to the infantile handiwork before him. “You know Viggo doesn’t like his food touching each other on the plates,” he said quite seriously while arranging the berries back into their neat little piles with a crisp white border of porcelain in between.

“You should tell him to get the fuck over it,” Pam informed pointedly with a signature attitude that wreaked havoc with the other moms at preschool who insisted their children suffered all kinds of intolerances; wheat, gluten, dairy and the likes before Pam would stuff said food containing item into the child’s mouth with an ‘I told you so’ look. The only time it hadn’t gone in her favour was the child with a peanut allergy, so she had been loathed to admit that was actually a genuine one. Though plunging that epi-pen into the child’s soft flesh with force had been quite fun to the vampiress. “The world isn’t going to baby him like you do.”

“Pamela!” Eric growled becoming agitated with their usual verbal sprawl on respective parenting techniques. In his opinion she was too hard and uncaring, where he was too soft and indulging. Thankfully Niall and Sookie tempered the extremes to a middle ground.

“Pancakes are burning,” she grinned pointing at the black smoke emerging under the hob.

“FUCK!” he growled out, seconds before the fire alarms started to go off.

“I’m on it,” Pam announced with a lethargic note to his pleading expression while he tried to smother the source of the smoke under the sink. She hovered up to take out the batteries from the infernal noise maker but by the telling sound of thumping little feet above, the damage had already been done.

“Careful on those stairs,” Eric yelled up with worry, which was completely ignored by all the owner’s sets of impatient feet causing ruckus at the top of the stairs with a measured amount of shouting and shoving. “I said be careful!” he repeated with horror at the sight of the little ones elbowing each other to get down the quickest. His heart didn’t beat but he felt the sensation of it stopping nonetheless as the smallest child, Pinnie, began to tumble down the stairs with the violence that ensued. Within a second, an excruciatingly long second by his account, she popped out of the melee to safely land in Eric’s arms.

“Morning, Uncle Ewic,” she spoke shyly with a good batting of her impossibly long eyelashes as his erratic state settled to find her completely unharmed while the rest dribbled and bounced into the large living area one by one.

“How the? Who opened the stair gate?” he demanded, the answer of which came to him from Little Spike who sauntered down last at a leisurely pace twirling a Philips head screwdriver in his hand.

“Gonna have ta try harder to keep us out next time, mate,” Little Spike grinned while placing the tool in Eric’s demanding hand.

“Should have known it was you,” Eric grumbled at the little delinquent while tucking the screwdriver in his back pocket. “Off you go,” he commanded directing both children to the designated play area that was being overtaken by the noisy bunch.

“Got a fag?” Little Spike asked in imitation of his idolised namesake.

“Git!” Sookie admonished as she emerged from their shared bedroom with tired eyes. “The nerve of that boy.”

“Morning,” Eric whispered before sneaking in a stealthy kiss.

“Morning,” she smiled back until they were interrupted by Viggo tugging at his father’s pant legs.

“Can I help?”

“Of course son,” Eric answered cheerfully before fetching a chair to set up by the stove to follow their normal Sunday morning routine of cooking pancakes together. It had been Sookie’s suggestion in the hope that through learning to prepare a meal it would make his rigid eating habits decrease with time and, in the process Viggo often used his faery magic to restore some of Eric’s inevitable mishaps in the kitchen.

His eyebrows furrowed a little when placed on the chair. “I can’t fix that,” Viggo said matter-of-factually while pointing at the blackened and wet pancakes in the sink before his father emitted a tired sigh.

All but Eric’s cheeks were red and ruddy from the cold while the children glided down the hillside tumbling and falling more often than not into the soft snow between bouts of giggles while Eric hastily tried to tie their scarves just that little bit tighter, set their hats back in place and wipe their runny noses while they wiggled in his hold.

Sookie had reluctantly taken a seat on the large family sleigh that stood stationary after falling off one of the children’s sleds on her first glide down the low hill. Eric’s overprotective instincts had soared at the sight of her pregnant body tumbling with Eva to the side of the hill giving cause to a heated discussion till their little girl’s hands sparkled tauntingly, ceasing all further arguments.

“Uncle Ewic?” Bran asked from his perched position on the farm horse that pulled the sleigh around the property, his little hand pointing towards some footsteps in the snow. “Whose are those?”

“The Tomte in the barn,” he replied without much thought while keeping the child unnecessarily steady in the saddle. “He lives there.”

“Is he the baby Jesus, Momma?” Eva asked from her snuggled position against her mother’s stomach hoping to ‘hear’ her future siblings inside.

“ERIC! Stop! Continue to play!” Sookie yelled while they simply looked on, waiting patiently to see who would win this round. Little Spike sadly missed his namesake to place his usual bet of gummy bears with. “Don’t listen to him!”

“Are you, or are you not cold?” he demanded in a tone that would otherwise put the chill in her.

Sookie raised her brow, daring him to force an end to the fun the children were having before he grumbled a defeated ‘carry on’.

“You pwomise Santa knows we’re here and not home?”

“Yes,” Pam replied stoically, having become far too bored to be annoyed anymore with hearing that particular question come from tiny lips.

“But how does he know?”

“He just does,” she answered with a roll of her eyes. “He just doesn’t know where this little helper hid the credit card receipts.”

“What?”

“Never mind, go to sleep,” she quickly distracted before placing a soft kiss to a forehead. Adding warning to the sight of more questions orbiting in tiny eyes, “Don’t make me glamour you.”

“Go to your own bed, Spike,” Pinnie complained as he wriggled himself in the warm channel between his sister and his cousin who had soon exchanged their separate beds for one upon arrival.

“Lemme,” he whined with a pout. “They all snore.”

“So do you,” she whispered with a hiss, not wanting to wake up Eva.

“Do not!” he yelled, thwarting Pinnie’s previous efforts and causing the darkened room to instantly light up with Eva’s destructive light and the two little children beside her to grab onto the hairs on their head defensively.

“You should be nicer to your sister!” an unknown voice spoke with warning. Eva’s light show was subsequently forgotten as the three little ones screamed their lungs out in fright.

“QUIET!” the little man with a large unkempt grey beard and red felt hat bellowed.

“Meanie!” Eva cried, discharging the current building up in her hands to his beard and knocking him to the floor in the process.

38 thoughts on “Part II – Santa”

OMG! Those kids are delightfully funny! Well, we’ll have to see in the next chapter whether they offed Santa, now won’t we? I tell you, Pam is probalby the most recalcitrant of all those kiddos….. loved it! and the cooking experiment…oh my! And…I’m like Viggo still –can’t have things touching on my plate –and my grandson inherited that and drives him mom nuts! 🙂
Best to you and yours this Christmas season!
Pat

My brother was the same, my mother even got him a plate with little compartments… he got over it somehow though I’m not sure how… I used to drive him mad by purposefully mashing food together and watching his face cringe in disgust… I came up with some strange flavour combinations in the process… ah siblings… Yep Pam is probably the worst and Willa (who is always absent because she’s pretty boring) is probably Ms Goody Two Shoes. Right back at ya! Enjoy your Christmas with your loved ones! 😀

*mashes food together in demonstration with lots of wet sloppy sounds* LOL, I’ll give you the same reasoning I gave him, which was quite impressive for a kid three years younger than him now that I think about it… ‘It’s exactly what happens in your stomach…’ I find it interesting that there’s so many of you who still have this into adulthood, how do you eat out? I’m going to obverse my brother a little bit closer now to see if he’s just covering up the fact better now or really has gotten over it… Glad to hear you love this! The kiddos are oodles of fun to write!

Yeah we get an extra day so it continues on the 26th but it’s been great so far 😀 Hope yours has been too and I’m glad you to hear you continue the antics of these little ones and their parents… I guess we still like the parents right?

No, I just like him best. 🙂 I like the other too, but Eric is the most child-like of the four. He hasn’t lost his child-like nature. He’s fun. Sookie’s parental, Pam’s not quite sure what to be at this point; Bitch vampire Mommy or Diva, and Niall just seems happily confused and horny!

Pam will soon release her own book on parenting vampire style to counteract the gimme gimme and take attitude of millenials. Then open a highly priced pink finishing school where she whips other people’s kids into shape…

LOL! That goes without saying. They would arrive as Ingrates. They would leave as gracious, young adults with the ability to properly speak and write the “English” language as well as knowing the appropriate times to use the rather salty vocabulary I could teach too.

I think I subconsciously wrote over exaggerated versions of family members into this tale. Eric is very much like my grandfather with his worries and protectiveness in a very caring way. It started in the fixin’s with his fear of chemical cleaning products and other overbearing tendencies. I imagine he reads those mommy and me blogs at night speculating that vaccines are causing autism… I didn’t realise it till Pat mentioned it but Viggo is like my brother as a child and I was a lot like Pinnie when little… Did you ever see the Spike and Buffy video I posted alongside the final chapter of the epilogue? Spike’s not the worst vampire to emulate… the wanting to smoke and the breakout skills, well we’ll just have to give a bit of a sideways glance to that cause the real Spike is great…

Oh my gosh, these kids are a delight. Is it awful to say I’m glad they aren’t mine? I have four granddaughters, ages 2 to 8. They can get pretty rambunctious, too. I wonder if someone shouldn’t have a word with big Spike and tell him to stop corrupting little Spike.

Well Pam is rather particular with the word ‘Mine’ so I think she’s quite happy keep them as her own. Maybe they can play with your grandbabies… or are they even too ill mannered for that? Were you one of the ones that never saw Buffy the Vampire Slayer too? As far as I’m concerned Spike is a great role model competing with Eric for the title heart of gold, he has some nasty habits that Little Spike might be trying to imitate but that’s a pretty standard phase of any childhood, trust me he’s not smoking, Pam will be smelling that on him instantly…

OMG I hate food touching unless they are meant to be – so stew is supposed to be as meats cooked in sauces are. If I want gravy on potato then that’s ok lol. My son is worse than me and we have little dishes for dips, baked beans, sauces so they don’t touch other foods – my husband just thinks we are neurotic but has learnt the wisdom of asking how we want the food putting on the plate rather than trying to remember how OCD food rules! Our son is worse as he won’t even try casseroles/stews. Lucky for me I introduced him to pasta and sauces, rice and sauces, cottage pie from weaning so his mind sees them as belonging together (although we put rice at the side because that’s what I have to do lol) – it’s very hard with Autistic traits to change perceptions later. My uncle used to make me heave at the table – he always maintained he’d put his pudding on plate with dinner as it all mixes in the stomach anyway. He thought it would save a lot of hassle of serving pudding after dinner and save extra dishes. Thankfully my Aunt didn’t agree (to put it mildly) but I dread to think what he does now she’s gone! It was bad enough at family parties as he’d dump a spoon of trifle, or whatever other creamy desserts were available, on plate with sandwiches etc to save going back later for dessert, he’d be mopping up dessert with sausage rolls quite happily. Now I feel sick just thinking about it!